Structuring and managing your company

While it is true that every business is different, the reality is that there are only three underlying areas of focus for any company:

  • Product Leadership

  • Operational Superiority

  • Customer Intimacy

Every company needs to have competence in all three but organisations can only really excel in one. The best answer for your company is not always the most obvious answer.

How should you focus your company and what are the implications for the way you structure and manage it?

Product Leadership

We have the “Best Product” and continually push our products into the realm of the unknown, the untried or the highly desirable. Our products and services expand performance boundaries.

Implications:

• A focus on core processes of invention, product development and market exploitation

• A business structure that is loosely knit, ad hoc and ever changing to adjust to the entrepreneurial initiatives and redirections necessary for working in unexplored territory

• Management systems that are results driven, that measures and reward new product success and don’t punish the experimentation needed to get there. Failure provides much more learning than success

Product leadership example: Apple

Operational  Superiority

We have the “Best package availablet” – a combination of quality, price and ease of purchase that no one else in the market can match

Implications:

• Processes for end-to-end product supply and basic services that are optimised and streamlined to minimise cost and hassle

• Standardised, centrally planned operation with few decisions left to staff

Operational superiority example: Dell Computers

Customer Intimacy

We provide a “Bespoke Solution” We build bonds with customers and deliver not what the general market wants but what the individual company wants

Implications:

• Obsession with core processes of solution development, results management and relationship management

• Structure that delegates decision making to employees close to customers

• Management systems geared to creating results for carefully selected and nurtured clients

• A culture that embraces specific rather than general solutions and thrives on deep and lasting client relationships

Customer intimacy example: Azure Partners

To learn more, contact Mike Robson or Peter Henry on 0207 100 1233 or mike.robson@azurepartners.co.uk